Speaker
Abstract
It seems like there’s always a hot new library or framework promising great things. But people often forget about the pain and effort required to move from an old technology to a new one. How long will it take? If you finish, will it be worth it? And if you don’t, could it leave you in a worse place than where you started?
Drawing from my experience of the Typescript migration we recently completed at Monzo I’ll take you through some of the different outcomes of technical migrations and the things we learned along the way, and leave you with a toolkit to tackle your next migration project.
Interview
I’m primarily focussed on customer operations, building internal tooling to manage service and demand. I’m also the Discipline Lead for web, which means making sure we’re heading in the right direction and helping to establish a vision for where we want to be.
I know that migrations are an inevitable part of working in software, and I wanted to share our lessons learned so that they might help others in the same position. I’m also proud of what we achieved as a team, even if it wasn’t super smooth sailing all the way through.
This talk is for anyone who needs to effect change in the organisation - it’s not just a technical talk, it’s all about stakeholder management and navigating change. Even introducing a new piece of software or a new team process can require a level of buy-in and preparation that you might not have expected.
I hope this talk provides people with a toolkit to use when they approach their next migration, so that they can make it as low-risk and low-friction as possible.
Topics
QCon London 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile Hosted by Sareh Heidari Senior Software Engineer @F1 Arcade®From the same track
Wednesday 9 April
10:35 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session migration So You’ve Decided To Do a Technical Migration Sophie Koonin Web Engineering Lead @Monzo, Writer, Speaker and Web 1.0 Enthusiast It seems like there’s always a hot new library or framework promising great things. But people often forget about the pain and effort required to move from an old technology to a new one. How long will it take? If you finish, will it be worth it? 11:45 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session design systems Scaling the BBC Design System: Tooling, Community, Governance and Gardening Sophie Beaumont Software Engineering Manager @BBC Do you have experience managing or contributing to a Design System that has to support multiple teams, disciplines’ priorities and competing product requirements? Wondering how to meet the long-term goals of the system without getting in the way of your stakeholders’ needs? 13:35 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session architecture Mobile Server-Driven UI at Scale Rafael Ring Senior Staff Software Engineer, Mobile Platform Team @Nubank, 10+ Years Working Full Stack Delivering changes to mobile applications is always painful: dealing with store reviews, users that don't update their apps and multiple concurrent versions being used at the same time. 14:45 Windsor (5th Fl.) Session web performance Speed at Scale: Optimizing the Largest CX Platform Out There Matheus Albuquerque Staff Software Engineer @Medallia, Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, Programme Committee @React Summit US, Mentor @TechLabs, International Speaker, Technical Reviewer In a world with a wide variety of network connections, any user can have a slow experience, and apps that delight users on fast connections can barely be usable on slow ones. 15:55 Mountbatten (6th Fl.) Session frontend The Ideal Micro-Frontends Platform Luca Mezzalira Director of 50 Cents Media | Former AWS & DAZN | QCon Cohorts Facilitator | O'Reilly Author | International Speaker | Architecture Storyteller Micro-frontends can help organizations scale frontend development, but without the right foundations, they often lead to unnecessary complexity and performance issues. How can you implement them effectively while avoiding common pitfalls?